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Monthly Archives: September 2012

After my somewhat veiled reference to a mysterious Mr. English, of whom I insinuated had first hand knowledge of alien life, I dropped off of my blog for a couple of weeks. Probably it was not a good idea for me to drop from blog-sight so suddenly, after leaving my many (92 to date) readers in suspense.

Perhaps fearing that I had been abducted by aliens and whisked away to that mysterious base that is purported to exist on the far side of the moon, Rita and J.L. called me the other night from the small northern Minnesota town that they have recently moved to, near the Canadian border.

“We’re getting ready for a Romney victory in November,” said Rita. She is six and a half months pregnant, and J.L., unemployed for the past year and a half is preparing to launch a website targeted at the parents of overachieving children.

“As soon as the results are in, we’re packing the Scion and heading for Yellowknife,” she said that to me with more than a little anxiety into her voice.

“My God,” I said to her. “Yellowknife!! Don’t you guys watch Ice Pilots on TWC? Yellowknife is the end of the planet. Go up there and J.L. is pretty much cooked as far as job possibilities are concerned. No jobs for web designers in the NWT – maybe he can land a job as a rampie for Buffalo Airways, but that’s about all.”

“At least we’ll have decent healthcare,” she retorted.

“Didn’t you see the Boca video?” I asked. “You must have – it’s the one in which Romney comes off looking like a real ass when he says he doesn’t care about all the people that aren’t paying federal income tax. He is trying to backpedal now because of the elderly people included in that cherry picked percentage – and all of the people who are working but because their allowed deductions and their lower incomes do not have to pay federal income tax. He just banged on the old Tea Party gong to make it look like all of these people were government freeloaders.”

I am through blogging about the United States Presidential elections, at least for now. I need a break after taking a verbal beat down for remarks I made about Clint Eastwood’s appearance at the RNC last week – not only in this blog but on some other social media sites as well. I feel like it’s the morning after my fourth night in Vegas – I need to take a step back so I can catch my breath and recover. What a whirlwind. With the real campaign getting into gear, I’ll have to keep my strength up.

To take my mind off tongue lashings that I have received of late, I decided to turn my attention back to one of my favorite hobbies – researching conspiracy theories. The other day my niece Julie came down from Philadelphia to spend a few days with us in Florida. She knows of my affinity for a good conspiracy theory, so the first night she was here she asked me what my favorite conspiracy theory of all time was. I didn’t have to think long, as I have always had that one of the tip of my tongue.

“Does the name Gene Cernan mean anything to you?” I asked her. Before I continue, I have to say that my niece is a very intelligent young lady. She is 18 years old, and though Gene Cernan is not exactly a household name, the name Neil Armstrong is, and she immediately recognized Neil Armstrong as being the first person to ever set foot on the moon.

“Gene Cernan,” I told her, was the last man to set foot on the moon. And that was on December 14, 1972. It was a long time before my niece was born. I was 18 years old then, and it seems very far in the past.

Why haven’t we been back? Did we abandon the moon? Did the moon abandon us? Weren’t we supposed to be colonizing the moon by now? Why were we so gung-ho during the 60s/70s but the effort totally lost momentum — fast? Good questions. If we are to believe the United States government, the cost of going to the moon was far too high. In fact this may be true. Some feel that the risks involved were not worth the returns, and eventually a true disaster would occur that would doom space missions forever.

But there may have been another reason. Some evidence points to the fact that we may have been ‘waved off’. By this I mean by other moon colonists – aka aliens. As far fetched as this may seem, astronauts from the Apollo missions seem to have a lot to say about space aliens, including Dr. Edgar Mitchell of the Apollo 14 mission. Dr. Mitchell has been very outspoken on this subject and has voiced his first hand knowledge of contact with alien crafts while traveling in space.

Could there be a reason that we have not returned to the moon in the last 40 years, although with today’s technology it would be much easier than it was in 1972? When you consider that, then the wave-off theory becomes even more plausible. Will we return to the moon in 2020 as politicians are promising – or will it be moved back until 2030, or 2040 as the date approaches?

I will be writing more about this as time goes along. Do you perhaps have a conspiracy theory that you would like to share? If so I would like to hear about it. Next blog is going to be about Mr. English…stay tuned…

Last night Tulip called me from Tuluca Lake. It was a quarter till four in the morning Florida time and I knew that she was probably halfway through her second bottle of Fairbanks port. I wasn’t about to answer the phone (you have to know Tulip). Besides, I was sleeping. The next day I listened to her message:

“I thought you were writing a blog E.P.? Holy mother, I’m looking at this lame excuse you have for a website and I don’t see sh*t about nothin’ that went on at that Republican Convention last week. Don’t you know that Clint Eastwood was talking last night? Couldn’t you come up with something to say about that?”

Even though I haven’t seen her in almost six and a half years, I could picture Tulip – a porcelain coffee mug of Fairbanks in one hand, an American Spirit dangling from the left corner of her mouth and her white Chuck Taylor All Stars planted firmly on the coffee table that faced the tiniest television set that anyone in Southern California confesses to owning. If you didn’t know Tulip, you would never know that she’ been married twice to the biggest name in professional wrestling to ever come out of St. Joseph, Missouri.

The next day I called her. I called late in the day of course, and caught up with her at Paty’s Diner – no question about it, the best place in Taluca Lake for lunch. Tulip was a little hung over and a little feisty, but what’s that among friends. The first thing that she asked me was what I thought of Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention the night before. I told her that I hadn’t really watched much of it and she asked me why.

“I was watching the Green Bay, Kansas City pre-season game,” I told her. After she berated me a bit, I came to realize that I had missed something important – on purpose, so I turned to the internet, and I watched Clint’s speech several times as penance for my football sins.

“You need to say something about that Clint Eastwood speech last night EP or forget about blogging.”

“You’re right,” I told her, so this is it:

Clint Eastwood is one of my favorite movie actors. I will watch his movies as long as I am alive to watch them. The “Bridges of Madison County” was filmed in my hometown in Iowa, and I have a special affection for his westerns. Yeah, I know that the line “make my day” came from his Dirty Harry days, but to me he will always be the Man With No Name. Ok…enough ass kissin’.

Mr. Eastwood is a life long Republican and makes no secret of that. He ran as a Republican for mayor of Carmel, California and has always backed Republican candidates, so I felt no particular surprise when Clint addressed the RNC. ( I thought that the backdrop used from the “Outlaw Josey Wales” was inappropriate considering the recent violence in Colorado, but what the heck.) I went online and listened to Clint’s speech twice. I thought for an 82 year old actor he gave a great performance. And it was a performance – but I thought that Clint could have done a much classier act. The empty chair was a lame prop, and to put the POTUSA in it and lecture him was, well, frankly beneath the likes of Clint Eastwood. You know, we have a lot of respect for the office of the President – Clint knows that – and then he messed up a couple of facts too, and when it comes to Afghanistan, we all know who decided to mix it up over there and it wasn’t Obama.

So I am over it with politics for now. Next week I am planning a piece on conspiracy theories surrounding the Apollo moon landings. Won’t that be a hoot. Bizarre just like the Republican National Convention.

This blog post is addressed to all of my faithful readers. You guys know who you are…, oh well what the heck : Rita and J.L; Tulip and Jason; Bev and Lisa – yes, all of you (at least half a dozen of you), who read my blog faithfully, this is a call to action.

When I started blogging back in March of 2012, I established a few ground rules for myself. Not many rules mind you, but just these four rules called, I never want to …

I never want to be called a Progressive. I might be one, but I will never call myself that. Call me a liberal any day. I like that much better because I sure as heck am not a conservative – do conservatives come up with watered down names for themselves?

I never want to curse in a blog post (so far so good, but that could change). I’m no holy-roller, but profanity detracts from content.

I never want to write without readers. If I don’t have people reading my blog then why write it? Thank God I have you six people, or I would have to take the site down.

I never want to write a blog linked to another person’s work. I don’t mean that I will not ever, ever, link. But I think a blog is supposed to be about my take on life, and my ideas – not someone else’s.

So, I am about to break rule number 4. Listen everyone; we are in the midst of a very important election here in the United States. It is important that we all become as informed as possible on the events that are bearing down upon us. A short while back, I came across this news item that I would like to share:

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